New vehicle designs must be thoroughly tested before being released to production to ensure safety and operation as intended. Modern testing typically includes outfitting a test vehicle with a plurality of sensors and recording data output by the sensors during a series of tests. For example, an aircraft prototype might be outfitted with sensors to monitor engine performance and the position of control surfaces. During flights tests, data from those sensors is typically transmitted to engineers on the ground for evaluation. Real-time monitoring is particularly advantageous because it allows engineers to continuously evaluate vehicle safety and adjust a test plan based on intermediate results.
Conventionally, a predetermined set of parameters collected by the sensors is transmitted via wireless link to a receiver at a monitoring station. The data is then stored in a shared computer memory at the monitoring station and displayed on engineers' computer screens. The number of parameters that can be stored and monitored, and the temporal resolution and bit depth thereof, is limited by the bandwidth of the wireless link. In addition, data links between the receiver, the shared memory, and the engineer's computers must have very low latency for proper data alignment and synchronization. Conventional vehicle performance monitoring systems also display only real-time vehicle performance data during a vehicle test.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a vehicle performance monitoring system that can accommodate a greater number of parameters, i.e. vehicle sensors, and higher sampling resolution within available wireless link bandwidth while also allowing engineers to view both real-time and historical performance data during and after a vehicle test. There is also a need for a system allowing engineers to individually and selectively display vehicle performance parameters upon request within a limited bandwidth by transmitting only requested parameters from the vehicle to a monitoring station and caching those parameters to obviate duplicate transmissions.